Recently in Featured Business Category

Our latest business to be featured on our blog takes us into the world of cables, modems and power leads - the kind of world that video loves. Mmmmm electricity!

Al at cablestar has been selling online since early 2003 and first came to vzaar earlier on this year. We let him take up the story:

I first met the vzaar team at one of Channel Advisor’s Catalyst events having heard the concept of video in listings mentioned at an eBay University. We felt that it would be great to use video to promote our products and company, given that we sell to people who are quite technically minded. It’s such a simple idea - I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier!

Given the sheer range and volume of items we sell on our own website and on eBay, a shorter one off video that promoted our company, and designed to answer a few of the frequently asked questions we receive seemed the way to go. That way we could use the one asset a number of times and keep initial costs down. In addition, the video spokesperson we used has enabled us to quickly get across our core messages around prompt delivery time and customer refund policies. Our experience to date is that in some cases the customer doesn’t always read the copy on the page so we like the fact that we are also sharing that information more directly via video.

Adding video to our listings was a bit of a step into the unknown but we are pleased with results to date. Customer feedback has been very positive and we feel that our buyers enjoy the fact that they can see real people packing their orders. They get a feel for the company and who sits behind the company logo.

I was initially worried about how we’d add the video to our many many lines of stock but given that it was just pasting in some embed code we were up and running in a matter of hours. The unbranded player sits nicely alongside our frooition template and we certainly plan to introduce the video on to other platforms, such as Amazon and Pixmania in the near future.

On eBay two of our Detailed Seller Ratings have increased by 0.1% in the last 6 months which helps as strong DSR’s means better sales! They have also helped to keep us ahead of the competition in search which goes some way to ensuring our fees are as low as possible. With video it all adds up!

A new feature for us at vzaar, our Featured Business post allows us to share with you the success enjoyed to date by businesses who embrace video as a means to drive online sales.

So first up is Silver level vzaar seller Diamond Jewelry United who sell under the guise of bestprices_ms on eBay.

Bestprices, a diamond seller based in Belgium, sell diamond jewellery on eBay using vzaar. The firm has been in the diamond business for forty years and started selling diamond jewellery two years ago. They started selling on eBay in 2007 but only started making serious inroads in January this year when they started listing items daily.

Listing hundreds of quality items a month, all of which carry video, they have no doubt that videos help them sell more. That’s because when it comes to selling precious, high value items inspiring confidence and trust is vital for attracting buyers. “Although more people are buying diamond jewellery online every day,’ says the Managing Director Steven Grunhut, “it is still very risky as people are never 100% what they are getting because no 2 diamonds are alike.”

As well as inspiring trust, Steven believes vzaar videos a have given him a critical edge because despite being relatively new to eBay he’s already successfully competing with established sellers. “We have realized that there are hardly any online jewellers that are using this technology. When we started selling jewellery on eBay we had a tough time getting to the top, however once we started using vzaar our sales improved and within weeks we were competing with the top sellers in our category.”

Bestprices integrate the videos into their HTML listing templates meaning that the video is prominent and attractively integrated to best effect: Steven claims that each video only take about 5 minutes to create and drop into their individual template. In order to show off the diamond jewellery, Bestprices have also invested in some new video equipment and special lighting, but as their superb videos and increased selling success testifies, it was well worth it.